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Like Wikipedia, Wikia content is primarily available under a free content license, usually the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Unlike Wikipedia, Wikia wikis don't enjoy from regular production of data dumps, so the possibility to reuse their content is rather limited and their survival is more at risk.

Dumps are produced only on demand, hence – normally – for a small minority of wikis (in a typical month, about 50 random wikis are dumped). Users with appropriate rights (as of 2013, autoconfirmed users, sysops and higher) can request a dump at the same Special:Statistics; the request is processed in a "first in, first out" queue, max one wiki every 5 minutes, usually during low traffic hours (23–8 UTC).

History

Two "complete" dumps of Wikia exist, 2008 and 2010. A 2007 dump (not verified) also exists. After 2010, Wikia stopped making regular dumps. At some point around 2010, Wikia also started deleting inactive wikis, so it's possible that some content only exists in those early dumps.

In May 2013, only a couple dumps were produced every day, around 2-3 UTC, whatever amount of dumps is requested; till October 2013, no XML dumps were produced at all, only images.tar dumps of all the uploads to a wiki.
If you request too many dumps, your account may be blocked from requesting more, without notice (the button to request a dump disappears).

A directory list to access to all backups used to be at http://dumps.wikia.net/ ; no equivalent for the new host exists. All dumps (about 50k wikis) have been erased in July 2013 due to unspecified technical problems. Since October 2, 2013 the dumps are produced again and stored on Amazon's S3: all the previous dumps were lost.[3]
Since about November 2013, dumps have been (very) slowly repopulated after user requests, but bigger wikis have invalid gz files.[4]

As of 2015-01, dumps for closed/archived/"old" wikis (how many?) will no longer be published[6] and the 7z format is used instead.[7] There are other bugs which make many big wikis have invalid XML files (prematurely terminated before </mediawiki>).

Moved wikis

There have been substantial numbers of wiki communities leaving Wikia for various reasons, including two ad-heavy forced reskins in 2008 and 2010 and censorship of images to a PG13 level in 2012. Wikia has a de-facto policy of leaving the old wiki open and editable after the community has gone elsewhere, as a direct competitor to the new sites. This leaves two (or more) forks of the same project.

Do *not* presume the Wikia version of a wiki is the only version or the most up-to-date version as it may be years out of date if the original authors left years ago. There is a partial list of moved wikis at http://awa.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Moved_wikis

Former Wikia projects which are now independent will need to be backed up individually from their new homes.